Proposal Presentations

http://www.presentationzen.com/presentationzen/2006/01/index.html

Folks can start presenting their proposals this coming week (Nov 2), although I expect most folks to chose week 10 or Finals week for their presentation slots.  

Sign up for your presentation slot ASAP.   First come first served.

Make sure you build your presentation in google docs, and share it with the class share folder right away.  Even if it is just a single slide to mark your place.

Sharing digital video

http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/955


What does this video have to do with our class?

How could these ideas change what we produce, the questions we ask, the audiences we seek, the impact we make?

Revising your research proposal. . .

The first challenge of a research proposal is to establish a research question that is worth answering.   Who decides if your question is worth answering?  You are free to chose any question you like, however social science is a social enterprise.  Ultimately, the people who decide are your readers, and more specifically, they are the experts within the research communities that your findings should matter to.

You must define your relevant research communities through the construction of your introduction and your literature review.   Which research communities will care?  Who are the active researchers in your topic areas?  These people will be your reviewers.

Establishing the basis for the importance of your study is inseparable from defining your scholarly audience.  Your introduction and your review of literature must be animated by arguments that demonstrate the substantive, theoretical, and scholarly importance of your proposed work.

I have suggested three articles that argue effectively for the importance and relevance of their research topics:

1.   Michael Hechter, "From Class to Culture"   Michael is a very skilled and disciplined writer.  He is also a brilliant "crafter of arguments".   I want you to read the first 5 pages of his paper (his abstract and intro).  Obviously, his paper is much longer than your proposal can be.  However, you need to read his intro and pay attention to what he does, and how he does it.   Your proposal needs to muster a stronger case for your research.  

2.  Andrew Papachristos, "Murder by Structure".  Papachristos  is a young scholar, who writes well, but even more importantly, understands how to do "very good" research according to the standards of sociologists.  Please read the introduction, but more importantly,  pay attention to how he frames his research and how he tests his research questions.  How can your proposal provide a better test of your questions?

3.  Derek Kreager, "Strangers in the Halls".  Kreager is probably the best young Criminologist/Sociologist in the US today.  His work is especially good because he understands that research does not "stand alone".  Research takes place in conversations with communities of scholars.   Pay attention to how Kreager frames his work in relation to an active area of research and connects to real live researchers. This connection is missing, or drastically underdeveloped in your proposals right now.  That is to be expected in new work, but, it needs to be fixed.   If you can't find an active community of scholars that surround your research area-- then you have to doubt whether the research you propose is worth doing.  

All three articles are easily available online through JSTOR.  

What research is worth doing?

This is Seattle.  It is a place worth living in.   What makes a research project worth doing?

Week 6!?

1. Discuss article review #2 in general
2. Prep for presentations
3. Presentations
4. Discuss what makes research worth doing
5. Project idea organization?

Article Review Instructions

We do two article reviews. The first review is based on a title listed on the course schedule, and each student selects one of the available articles. The second review is based on one of several articles suggested by each student and related to the area of their research proposal.  

Research article review #1 Instructions

1. Chose one of the available readings. 
2. Team up with other students who are reviewing the same article.
3. Create a google document for collecting your notes about the article.
4. Read the article and take notes. Read it again.
1. Highlight the most important parts.  Make notes.  Work to understand all parts of the research.  Do follow up reading on the methods if you don’t understand them.
5. As a preliminary step to writing, answer the following questions
1. Questions to answer while taking notes
6. After you understand your research well enough to answer those questions you can begin writing your "abstract" or summary of the research article.
7. Create a google document, and then copy paste the following template into your document and use both the formatting and the instructions embedded inside
1. Template for article review #1

Research article review #2 Instructions:

There are two key differences between assignment 1 and 2. First, in assignment #2 you need to find an article to review first. It needs to be sociological research on a topic that interests you and the reported research must include the analysis of data. Second, you will need to revise your abstract based on comments from classmates. To do this, you will need to share your document with some of your classmates.

1. Post three possible research papers including title of research and a link to the full text of the article on the article options spreadsheet. 
2. I will leave a comment that indicates which (if any) of the articles are suitable for our course. 
3. Create your google doc, set sharing to anyone with link can comment. Then share it with the two classmates in your writing team. 
4. Follow the other instructions for review article #1, and use the same template, with one addition.
5. Additional section: add a paragraph to your conclusion that explains how the reviewed article relates to you research interests and possible project topics. (this will increase the max word count by 200 words)

Quiz Intro

Time to use your brain!   Go to the google documents folder "Grad Methods" and open "Collaborative Quiz Review Notes".   In that document you will find instructions, the quiz questions, and a link to the quiz.   Please complete your quiz before the start of next week.  i.e. I will start evaluating the quizzes on Monday Morning.
Cheers.

Proposal, IRB, and Survey Instruments

Brandon Brooks completed his Masters Thesis from our OU Sociology program this summer.   Brandon solidified his ideas about what he wanted to study during the spring quarter of his first year.   We worked together all summer and through the next year, going from a proposal draft to a finished thesis about 15 months later.  
    Many features of his thesis project were extremely ambitious, involving extensive data collection, and the integration of survey research with social network data collected from a newly created FaceBook app.   Brandon was initially interested in how students FB networks might change during their first year at University, therefore he designed a two stage data collection plan:   he administered the survey and FB data collection at the start and the end of Fall quarter of 2009.   The T1 and T2 surveys ask different sets of questions, but record the FB data from both time points.
    The project evolved a bit, such that the analysis reported in his thesis only relies on the data collected during the first wave of Fall quarter.   In a sense, Brandon collected far more data than he needed to perform a single thesis project, however, in doing so, he pretty much guaranteed that he would be able to ask more than one question of the data, and in the end was able to report some new and interesting results.
In two weeks we will discuss his thesis and a paper the we are revising for submission to a journal on information and society.  
   This week we will concentrate on a draft version of his thesis proposal, his IRB materials, and the survey instruments that he created.   The course drop box also includes a couple chapters from our text book that should be helpful in assessing Brandon's project.  If you have questions on the project or our class meeting this Tuesday, please post them as comments in this thread.   - Ted    [ps, that photo is actually of a different Brandon Brooks]

Science, how does it work?

Today we will discuss questions like:   What is science?  How does it work?  How do our notions of science relate to how and why we do research?  We have four readings to kick off our conversation with:

• Sagan Chapter 1, The Most Precious Thing 
• Sagan Chapter 2, Science and Hope
• Feynman, Cargo Cult Science
• Stark  Becoming a Sociologist